How is the soul linked to conscienciousness?

Tagged:

The soul is not part of the body. Consciousness is also not part of the body, but it instead is tied to the body by a phenomenon we’re only recently coming to grips with, a phenomenon I call “emergent abstraction.” Consciousness emerges out of brain activity like Minecraft out of the 1s and 0s of a hard drive.

There is at least one thing we can identify that’s between the body (brain) and consciousness, the mind. The mind is abstract just like consciousness is. But it is less abstract, we can understand more of it by poking around the brain.

I consider the mind as operating in patterns. Everything we experience and can think about is a mental pattern. The process of thought builds on these patterns.

Consciousness is the ‘agent’ that watches and makes the decisions that affects these patterns.

If you ask and meditate on the question, “how is mind in relation to consciousness, you’re on the road towards working out what the soul is. The distinguishing feature of the soul is that it exists whether or not your physical body does.

I consider the soul as ‘projecting’ into anything connected to it. The body, mind, awareness, and even further out things, like the living space and life patterns of the being, are projections of the soul.

Think about what a projection is for a few seconds. It can take something small and make it big. It can also take something with lots of dimensions and create a representation with fewer dimensions, like a map is a projection of a 3D globe onto a 2D surface.

The soul’s projection is the former type. I see the soul as a very very small, mathematical thing, representing a unique being. But it’s projection can find unique expression anywhere a being has the ability to seek out meaning.

For example, you can find the expression of a teenager’s soul by looking at the unique choices they made for their room. Sure, it’ll be messy, all teenagers are messy, that’s not a unique expression so you can’t look at it that way. Sure, it’s got posters of heartthrobs and stuffed animals. These things again, aren’t unique.

But look at the bookshelf, what’s there, what looks like it’s been read a hundred times? What poster is on the other side of the bed so she wakes up to see it every morning? If you turn your head sideways a bit and look for unique expressions, you’ll pretty much always find them, no matter where you look.

How did those expressions get there? Remember the ‘chain’. The soul projects directly into the consciousness and plays a role in what gets chosen. A person’s unique choices are expressions of their unique nature.

You can look at all these choices and discern their unique essence, their soul. That’s a bottomless well, and endless rabbit hole that one can wander down.